YourStake, YourStory Ep. 7- Making an Impact & Imaging What the Future Holds, ft. Zach Stein, Co-Founder and CEO of Carbon Collective

Gabe Rissman  00:07

Hi, everyone, and welcome to YourStake, Your Story. We are a video series focused on best practices around ESG. And really focusing on the financial advisor experience and what your challenges are and what's out there and what you might be worried about thinking about excited about. Today, I'm really excited to be speaking with Zack Stein, who is the co founder of carbon collective. Zack, really glad to have you on.

 

Zach Stein  00:34

Thanks so much for having me again.

 

Gabe Rissman  00:36

So do you want to start by sharing where you're where you're calling from today?

 

Zach Stein  00:40

So I'm in the Bay Area, right near Berkeley in a small town called Albany. It's a beautiful day, and we got a little bit of rain yesterday, some are expected and in this kind of drought-ridden region. I'm very happy about that.

 

Gabe Rissman  00:54

Thanks a lot of sense. And is that where did you grow up? Is that a recent move for you or

 

Zach Stein  01:00

I've been in the East Bay for about the past 10 years. So moving between Berkeley and Oakland, and now in Albany, and I grew up on the peninsula. So over near Stanford near Palo Alto, and it was there I actually have known my co founder, we first met when we were four years old, our dads went to Stanford together. So I have many fond memories of us playing in his backyard and things like that. And so it's pretty cool to be able to work with that person. 

 

Gabe Rissman  01:26

Would you ever have guessed that you would work together?

 

Zach Stein  01:31

You know, like, who knows what these things is? I like the phrase life is only linear in the rearview mirror. And yeah, we actually fell out of touch. He had a pretty interesting childhood when he was 10. His parents pulled him out of school, and they bought a sailboat. And they sailed around the world for five years beginning in the south of France. And they ended up in New Zealand. So I visited him in the Canaries, and in Tahiti during that time, but but kind of after that, we lost touch a bit. And we actually only ran into each other. Post College, I was living in Berkeley, and I was really into pickup basketball at the time. And I was crossing the street coming home. And this guy who was on a bike at the crosswalk, we're just staring at each other. I forget who said first, but I can tell when James Zack. And so yeah, after that, we started hanging out again. And it became clear that that we wanted to work together.

 

Gabe Rissman  02:39

That's amazing. And were you were you both in different jobs. And you decided to leave to start something together? Or what was that? Like?

 

Zach Stein  02:47

Yeah, I've had a very winding entrepreneurial path. I've been in sustainability for the past 10 years, post college, I did an urban farming fellowship in Berkeley, this was in 2011. That kind of opened my eyes up to the realm of sustainability, but through the lens of our culture, and our food system. So I actually with some of those fellows, my first job, my first real business was a worm farm. So we literally sold shit for a living. It was a pretty fun business was really interesting, very labor intensive. It's good for a 22 year old. And James. He's an engineer by training, he went to Olin College, which is a great small engineering school. And so he was working at an alternative energy startup that just happened to be like three blocks from my apartment at that time. So yeah, our paths I kind of through my urban farming path, what got increasingly into indoor farming, and ended up meeting someone who was developing some novel sensing technology for it, brought in James with it didn't wo